Football Manager: “Piracy is a very big problem for us”

Sports Interactive has admitted that piracy is still “a very big problem” for Football Manager.

Piracy has always been a well known issue for Football Manager, but it seems the problem is bigger than ever, despite technological advancements.

“Piracy is a very big problem for us. The official stats that we had were on Football Manager 2013, because that was uncracked for six months due a new type of protection system that we were using,” explained Sports Interactive Studio Director, Miles Jacobson.

“When they did eventually crack it, they actually left in something that phoned home. That meant that every time someone booted up the illegal copy, their IP address was being sent through to us. That’s how we managed to get all the stats together.”

What’s truly sad about the piracy issues is that although the company saw over 1 million PC copies and 750,000 copies of the mobile game, the stats they gathered showed 14 million pirated copies.

“However, as we uncracked by six months, we were actually able to see how being uncracked affected our sales and the reality is our sales went up around 17 per cent, so we now know as a fact what we always believed, which was it isn’t a case of every pirated copy of the game is a lost sale.”

“There are lots of people out there who for whatever reason, would not play the game if they couldn’t pirate it.”

Football Manager 2015 was released on November 7 for Mac and PC. Sports Interactive has said it has "not ruled out" Xbox One and PS4 versions, but is worried about financial issues because of the failure of the Xbox 360 version.

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